David Loshin as a series of posts going at the Data Roundtable:
and
The Impact of Data Element Renaming…
In “Bad Names,” David cites this example:
An example of this might be a column named “STREET_ADDRESS,” but that instead of that field holding a street number and name, it contains a set of flags indicating the types of customer correspondences that are to be sent to a home address instead of an email address. From one perspective, our assumption about what was stored in that field were mistaken, but on the other hand, conventional wisdom might have suggested otherwise.
I would agree, that at least looks like a bad name. Moreover, its one that is likely to trip up successors who have to deal with the data set.
David goes on to argue in “Renaming,” that finding and replacing all the uses of this name may lead to worse problems.
Ah, after thinking about it for a bit, I can see he has a point.
How about you?